March 23, 2011

Seven black city firefighters passed over for promotion because they did not score high enough on a written exam will rise to captains' ranks and get cash payments if the Houston City Council approves a lawsuit settlement Wednesday. ...

The seven passed exams for captain or senior captain in 2006, but many white firefighters scored higher. Because promotions were awarded to candidates with the highest scores, the seven did not make the cut.

They sued in 2008, arguing the city discriminated against them by using a racially biased test. The lawsuit states that the promotional exams "have an adverse impact upon African-Americans."

Whites who passed the exam were promoted at more than twice the rate of blacks who passed, according to the suit. It also claims that studies and research in organizational psychology demonstrate that written job knowledge exams have little value in predicting who will perform better in the positions at stake.

"There clearly were concerns with respect to the exam and the impact of the exam," he said. "As we looked at it, and as the court looked at it, we recognized that changes needed to be made to the exam so that it could properly validated for (equal opportunity) purposes."

Feldman said the Fire Department will begin using a new exam this year that has been validated by a testing firm to assure that it does not produce results related to the race or ethnicity of the test takers.

What a great idea! Why didn't anybody ever think of that before? How hard could it possibly be for a testing firm to produce results not related to race or ethnicity?

What a weirdly lucrative era this is for psychometricians ...

The plan headed to council does not settle how to test going forward. Wednesday's settlement would only dispose of the claims of the seven firefighters. Changes to the promotional system should be negotiated with the representatives of the entire firefighting corps, not just seven of them, said Jeff Caynon, president of the Houston Professional Fire Fighters Association. "Our issue is that the seven plaintiffs have dictated to the city changes to the promotional system irrespective of our collective bargaining agreement," Caynon said.

I was going to say -- "The beefy white guy in the windbreaker is, as usual, the only one to complain. Fortunately, the Republican Party is out to exterminate all public employee union power, so soon there won't be anybody to complain" -- but it turns out that Jeff Caynon is a beefy black guy.

The test is the primary factor in determining who gets promoted within the department. At the time the suit was filed, an education anthropologist at the University of Texas said explanations for black-white test score gaps include blacks more often receiving an inferior education than whites and minorities' vulnerability to performance anxiety that stem from stereotypes.

Sailer's First Rule of Firefighter Exams: In every city in America, it always comes as a surprise when the blacks don't do as well on the tests.

Sailer's Second Rule of Firefighter Exams: In every city in America, the "solution" usually winds up being, after a number of missteps, to lower the passing score so low that practically every white applicant who doesn't drool on the exam paper passes, then hire randomly from among all the passers.

the skill level for fire fighters and police officers are about the same as the military. could you compare the tests for the teenage miliary recruits and the 20 something firefighers and police officers.

the skill level for fire fighters and police officers are about the same as the military. could you compare the tests for the teenage miliary recruits and the 20 something firefighers and police officers.

We'd all have been better off if the Supreme Court had just let them hire strictly by race. Need to hire ten captains? Hire the best six white people, the best 1.3 black people, the best 1.7 latinos, the best 0.5 asians and do forth.

But they won't let us to that and they allow presumption of guilt based on disparate impact and every valid predictor of job performance has disparate impact. Therefore big public organizations can't hire except at random with no reference to ability.

I was going to say -- "The beefy white guy in the windbreaker is, as usual, the only one to complain. Fortunately, the Republican Party is out to exterminate all public employee union power, so soon there won't be anybody to complain"

What idiocy. Public sector unions are the worst forms of parasites. Because they're whites who complain about AA Steve is going to defend them.

"could you compare the tests for the teenage miliary recruits and the 20 something firefighers and police officers."

That's an interesting question, the ASVAB is broken differently by each service to determine minimum scores for jobs (the IQ percentile equivalent, AFQT, is based on 4 of the 10 subtests). The Army seems to, well, overcomplicate things. Instead of simply measuring g (I'll put asterisk next to subtests used for AFQT), they have some extraneous knowledge tests that recruits can study for. I suppose bothering to study does show conscientiousness (the Navy/Marine scoring is similar).51M--Firefighter GM=90General Maintenance (GM)= General Science + Arithmetic Reasoning* + Mathematics Knowledge* + Electronics Information

"In the wake of that disaster(Great Leap Forward), Mao's power was considerably shaken, so much so that two of his underlings, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, were able to wrest power from him. This, of course, infuriated Mao, who promptly began another disastrous campaign: the Cultural Revolution, which literally was a war against smart people."

In America, we have very smart people--liberal Jews and Wasps--using blacks and illegal browns to wage war on whites who are smarter than blacks but dumber tha Jews.

If Lei Feng was the greatest soldier of all time in RED OVER EXPERT China, then black firemen who score lower on exams must be the best of firemen in BLACK OVER EXPERT America. Call the brotha 'Lei Funk'.

Why don't they just be honest about it and officially dub white men as 'non-preferred citizens', and be done with it? - Apparently there are white men out there still dumb enough to be fooled by all the subterfuge and 'race-norming' etc and don't realize the reality of their situation. I'm begining to think that 'feudalism' is too weak a word to describe this system.'Caste' as in India is better.

"Hoxha forbade the ownership of color televisions and typewriters all the way until the 1980s, because they were a distraction from the true Albanian way of life, which was, of course, communism. The color television part wasn't that bad -- they became prevalent only in the 60s -- but godammit, the typewriter was invented in 1870. Then, he banned beards. You know, because they're incompatible with communism."

"This only fed his mad delusions (really not such a good idea to bestow knighthood on a dictator version of Charlie Sheen), so he demanded that his nearly illiterate wife, Elena, be made a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and the Royal Institute of Chemistry. Back home, she was crowned "Comrade-Academician-Doctor-Engineer," and top scientists had to include her name in their research. He also proclaimed Nicu, his alcoholic, womanizing son, to be a "scientist of international reputation" and alleged that he had published several volumes on nuclear physics, proving to Romania once and for all that studying hard will get you nowhere."

Lowering the "bar" so that more blacks can get promoted to Captain is reverse racial discrimination. Would anyone want a chief of surgery who won a promotion where the "bar" was lowered - just so there could be more "racial diveristy" among the ranks?

would you complain if a bunch of Asians blow everyone away on these "intelligence" exams?

but you'll say asians don't have the physicality to do the job, well, that's true for most asians, maybe, but there are enough of them that would absoultely be qualified to do the job and have more brains.

Ricci and the Gates/Crowley debacle changed my mind completely about public sector unions. They are the last organizations in America to actually stand up for blue collar whites, and they'll be the only one's to protest when the Republicans privatize all public services and sell off the public infrastructure to the corporations that benefit so much from race replacement.

But with the Asian population growing, and not all of them being future computer engineers or doctors or whatever, and not all of them being weak skinny geeks, but most of them being concerned about getting a good job, one with nice benefits, including a cushy pension, which if you're a not too ambitious lower IQ type being a firefighter qualifies here (if not actual firefighting, but they don't do much of that), then when more Asians start going after those jobs you'd expect even fewer Blacks to get them via a test. (Man am I proud of that sentence.)

So what they'll end up doing is dumbing down the test/defining down a passing result, putting all those who pass into separate hats per ethnicity, and then drawing out a number of names from each hat, that number being proportional to the size of that ethnic group in the local 'community'.

"Seven black city firefighters passed over for promotion because they did not score high enough on the captain's license exam will rise to captains' ranks and get cash payments if the Houston City Council approves a lawsuit settlement Wednesday...

The seven proved that they met all of the standards relative to performance as captain or senior captain in 2006, but many white firefighters scored higher."

The crazy thing is that fires tend to happen disproportionately in minority areas.

So, it seems reasonable to me that they should have minority fire fighters who have the same lived experiences and who can relate to the discrimination minorities experience on the receiving end of fires. It also seems reasonable to me that they should have fire fighters who will have the same level of competence in preventing fires.

"The long-held empirical value of pi = 3.14. I am not saying it should be necessarily viewed as wrong, but 3 is a lot better. Our children are struggling with a heck of a lot of the math, including geometry.

I guarantee you American scores will go up once pi is 3. It will be so much easier."

Steve you write this as a breaking story but as you yourself point out this is not a news story - it is a conventional practice story. It is only news in the sense that traffic jams are news. They happen every morning but just where is uncertain.

That's why being a conservative is not enough. One must nowadays be a reactionary.

It must start in the schools. Its time to propose the reintroduction of racial segregation in the public schools. One reason that school vouchers are opposed by liberals is that they might have the effect of reintroducing a form of segregation.

I favor racial segregation because White and Asian kids who do well in school don't benefit from the presence of Black and Hispanic students who don't.

It is harder to fight for equity in the firefighter cases because racial preferences there only effect a handful of middle aged men. Everybody has a kid in school.

School resegregation is a concrete and dare I say - progressive - proposal. This column is just a way for those who don't think they have a choice to have a voice. But bitching and moaning doesn't bring change.

So, the "adverse impact" is due to blacks not having as good of an education as whites… Here we have another example of those dang rich privileged whites going to Harvard and Yale, which blacks can't afford, taking all the firefighter promotions…

Maybe we should have segregated firehouses. The black firehouse full of those who don't score high enough to be promoted, and a white one, who do score high enough. Then, let the people of Houston (I live in Houston) decide which firehouse to call when their house is burning down. Public safety should NEVER just be about hiring the most competent people to save lives.

Steve, did you forget? Diversity is strength. What is stronger than having incompetent fire captains in the 4th largest city in the U.S? I know I'd rather lose my house or be dead than have too many whites in charge.

"but you'll say asians don't have the physicality to do the job, well, that's true for most asians, maybe, but there are enough of them that would absoultely be qualified to do the job and have more brains."

I don't know. The runty Japanese and Vietnamese were pretty hardy in their wars with us.

Blacks may not be much for promotion by written exams but they are plenty pro-motion when it comes to bumping-and-grinding. And though Hispanics aren't the best engineers of locomotion, they are plenty loco-motion when it comes to illegally crossing into America.

I have a great progressive idea for dealing with this problem. Ban written language altogether which is divisive than inclusive. After all, global elites have risen above us through their higher-levels of book learning. If all men were illiterate and relied only on oral communication, the whole of humanity would be a lot more equal. It is the written language itself that is the problem!! It be elitist. Oratariats must bring down the Litogeosie.

I say bring on the future in Fahrenheit 451. We need firemen who burn books and other written material, especially 'racist' exams.

And to progressively favor blacks, maybe we should ban spoken language too. All communication must be by singing and dancing.

And for the sake of 'social justice', the New Police--or Brolice--should go after the lawful than the criminal. The lawful are more evil because their law-abiding-ness supports the status quo instead of creating social havoc that may pave the way for revolution. And of course, in our pop culture, rap music is more moral than stuff like Father Knows Best.

Has anyone try to construct a test that is racially biased in favor of blacks?

It would be interesting to see what a test looked like where blacks outscored whites consistently and with the same margin of score difference.

Interesting, but probably impossible. IQ is problem-solving and learning ability - if you're testing performance, test-takers will adapt to the new test, even if it's written in ebonics and the subject is black popular culture. The only way to do it is to move the goalposts, e.g., bash whites over the head with a hammer before they take the test, pay them handsomely to take a dive, etc.

I have little doubt "they" have tried, though. I bet a few have tried, and tried, and tried.

"Disparate impact" laws and the expectation of equal racial outcomes reward failure. The worse the failure, the bigger the reward. The law doesn't even allow for excuses like "but we can't even get blacks to apply for the job"! It's so bad, it's to the point of suggesting a strategy of winning by losing.

E.g., if blacks coordinated their efforts, they could really clean up. Anyone who pays attention to gubbmint knows that at least in some sectors, blacks are (sometimes heavily) overrepresented compared to their percent of the population. That means everyone else has to go singing for their supper (12.5% or more black employees) if they want to avoid lawsuits. Do I have to go on? There aren't enough blacks left over, especially if you remove the millions on welfare, with felony records, or in prison. As long as blacks don't do something stupid like clean up their act or suddenly get smarter, American "anti-discrimination law" is just a (guaranteed) back-end way of extorting money from non-blacks via lawfare.

I don't know. The runty Japanese and Vietnamese were pretty hardy in their wars with us.

If we're comparing mental toughness, sure, the Vietnamese were in it to win it. They were fighting for their homeland against the alien. But it's hard to measure ass-kicking ability from a guerrilla war like that. And counting casualties probably won't make the Vietnamese look too good. But obviously, the technology and wealth disparity is a huge factor that makes a mess of answering the question.

2 million Japanese military were killed in WWII; presumably, the overwhelming majority died at the hands of American soldiers. America only lost 130k or so in both theaters. And the technological and strategic disparities weren't nearly as wide as with Vietnam.

To answer dumbass's question:

1) Are we really going to argue over a theoretical, non-existent problem? Okay, sure, let's do.

2) Firefighters have physical tests, too AFAIK, but blacks don't have problems passing them, AFAIK, so they aren't an issue. Yellows would not pass them at the same rates unless the tests were given the "driver's license test" treatment.

3) Learn to deal with the fact that whites lag yellows slightly at mental tasks, and blacks slightly at physical tasks, but outperform yellows and blacks at tasks that involve both.

Lowering the "bar" so that more blacks can get promoted to Captain is reverse racial discrimination. Would anyone want a chief of surgery who won a promotion where the "bar" was lowered - just so there could be more "racial diveristy" among the ranks?

No. But I can easily see an elite that wanted everyone else to have a chief of surgery like that, while they fly to Parador for their brain surgery.

P.s., "reverse racism" and its derivatives are a way of breaking out the non-crime of racism against whites from the capital crime of racism against non-whites.

The only way to stop this is to sue the NBA, NFL, NCAA, among others, for discriminating against White athletes. File suits that say that the dominance of Blacks at certain positions can ONLY be the result of racial discrimination.---------Ultimately this is not sustainable. A White minority, suddenly made so, forced to pay for wealth transfers to other races, and a government class made of other races, is highly likely to revolt. First by widespread tax evasion, and then by overt political/cultural revolts culminating in armed rebellions. It has happened before: Whiskey Rebellion, Bacon's Rebellion, Committee of Vigilance, Regulators, Civil War, etc. There's a long strand of that in US history.

If we're comparing mental toughness, sure, the Vietnamese were in it to win it. They were fighting for their homeland against the alien. But it's hard to measure ass-kicking ability from a guerrilla war like that. And counting casualties probably won't make the Vietnamese look too good. But obviously, the technology and wealth disparity is a huge factor that makes a mess of answering the question.

The Vietnamese led by Ho Chi Min were strategically brilliant and tactically stupid at the same time.

They really know how to pick their battles against an "effete" first world enemy without the stomach for massive casualties, and to exploit the weaknesses of French and American media-driven democracy. But their tactics were little more than human-wave assaults and kamikaze bombings.

If only we had the guts to stick it for a few more years; the VC would have been bled to death, the peasants would have eventually risen up against their feared Hanoi overlords, and the war would have turned out very differently.

"2 million Japanese military were killed in WWII; presumably, the overwhelming majority died at the hands of American soldiers. America only lost 130k or so in both theaters. And the technological and strategic disparities weren't nearly as wide as with Vietnam."

No. As in Europe where the British wore down the Germans, but it was the Russian peasant soliders who checked the Third Reich's army and vanquished them, in the Pacific the Japanese were beleaguered by the National army of China where the Emepror lost most of his men in waging a war of occupation.

America, secure in the remote Western Hemisphere without a rival, was the last powerful country left standing, and solvent.

This is an instance where one is at a loss whether to blame the ignorance or arrogance of Americans for pretending to glories you never earned.

Lei Feng's story is largely mythology. The Chicoms wanted to spread a tale of helping your fellow Chinese man and supporting communism, and who made a better model for young impressionable men better than a self-sacrificing soldier killed in a tragic way? One should also remember that the Army was considered to be one of the best occupations a young man could get into in Maoist China. Out of the fields, a good pay (at least compared to a number of alternatives), a job most guys could do if given the opportunity, etc.

There is definitely a shortage of black brain surgeons. Lets lower the standards so more blacks can qualify. Don't laugh this has probably happened in the medical profession already. Maybe not exactly that way, but I bet a substantial number of black doctors aint up to par.

I think one will find that large numbers of British/Commonwealth soldiers were fighting large numbers of Japanese soldiers on mainland Asia pretty much continuously 1941-45. Im sure they managed to inflict a few dozen of those Japanese casualties.

Yep. If we're going to try to get a desired proportion of blacks in a job, we would be much better off determining the quota per race, and then filling each race's quota with the best candidates we could.

But doing that would be too transparent--it would be impossible to pretend we were really just trying to be more inclusive in our search for candidates, or trying to fix a broken test, or something. It would be a naked racial spoils system, in which each identifiable racial/ethnic group with enough political weight got its percentage of the jobs.

But these programs can't survive if they're in the open. The overwhelming majority of people would oppose them, if they were set out in the clear light of day, and it would be hard even for our increasingly immune to public opinion ruling class to leave the programs in place, after that.

Ive heard this before and I dont quite understand the above point. Can anyone (Reg) explain? --anonymous

What's to explain? Every gun-permit regulation-- e.g., high fees, felon exclusion-- comes down harder on blacks than on whites. Yet no black leader complains about this disparate impact. Because "disparate impact" is a fraud. (And because they know the true nature of their constituents!)

a. Black political leaders tend to be pro-gun-control, since they're mostly urban (where gun violence is a daily problem) and mostly liberal (thus not ideologically opposed to gun control) .

b. The real reason blacks will be able to get far fewer CCW permits than whites is the difference in rate of felonies. It's not going to be fun *at all* to argue in public that this isn't fair, and more convicted felons should be allowed to carry concealed weapons. That sort of argument will play extraordinarily poorly with most voters. (Though the most serious 2nd amendment advocates will say "Yep, they've served their time, it's a fundamental right, let em buy guns.")

One Anonymous wrote:-----"Hoxha forbade the ownership of color televisions and typewriters all the way until the 1980s, because they were a distraction from the true Albanian way of life, which was, of course, communism. The color television part wasn't that bad -- they became prevalent only in the 60s -- but godammit, the typewriter was invented in 1870. Then, he banned beards. You know, because they're incompatible with communism."

I think one will find that large numbers of British/Commonwealth soldiers were fighting large numbers of Japanese soldiers on mainland Asia pretty much continuously 1941-45. Im sure they managed to inflict a few dozen of those Japanese casualties.

What's to explain? Every gun-permit regulation-- e.g., high fees, felon exclusion-- comes down harder on blacks than on whites. Yet no black leader complains about this disparate impact. Because "disparate impact" is a fraud. (And because they know the true nature of their constituents!)

I didn't know WTF you were talking about until this explanation, either. It's a good point, but "disparate impact" is not a general legal theory. It's quite specific, applying only to hiring practices, AFAIK.

You can really run amok on liberal "principles" if you elevate it to a general principle, though.

I believe I pointed this out during the brouhaha over public employee unions going on in the Midwest. Once GOP Governors destroy public sector unions, the diversity bureaucrats will get the second to last line of defense against affirmative action throughout the government demolished ( The last line of defense is civil-service laws. ) So ironically, one of the unintended consequences of GOP union-bashing will be even less efficient and more wasteful government because you will have one less big hurdle preventing the lawyers, judges, and bureaucrats from greater social engineering, as Leslie Nielsen would say; Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes.

Obama, who is pushing a rewrite of the nation's education law that would ease some of its rigid measurement tools, said policymakers should find a test that "everybody agrees makes sense" and administer it in less pressure-packed atmospheres, potentially every few years instead of annually.

At the same time, Obama said, schools should be judged on criteria other than student test performance, including attendance rate.

I guess showing up for class is a relatively low bar to pass, though even that is unlikely to result in the results they want to see.

Check out the older ones. We know the story; we've been known to advise parents to get their kids out of that school and home or private school them. We just are forced to act as subversives, 'cos the administrators are so paranoid they don't even approe of you doing discipline anymore.

"...need more black brain sugeons. Lets lower the standards so more blacks can qualify. Don't laugh this has probably happened in the medical profession already. Maybe not exactly that way, but I bet a substantial number of black doctors aint up to par."

Heh. The new "health care" law has tons of quotas in it. Things like no government money goes to universities/med schools/clinics, etc. unless they meet AA standards.

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